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The Lovely Katika, the scrappy Fox

Meet Katika, my first polymer portrait doll.  I suppose Edgar and Oscar are also portrait dolls, but Kat is  not a dead male author, so I figure she's the first in a new-ish category?  Oh, I'm babbling...I just finished a 20-page paper on The Turn of the Screw that nearly killed me and now I can barely see straight.

Anyhoo, Kat kindly allowed me to post this photo, and so you can see how pretty she is.  She requested a fish-bone braid, beaded jewlery and a matching purse, so those were all fun, new things I learned while working on her doll.  I luuuurve the fish-bone and will definitely use it again.

Now, totally unrelated to dolls, I had to share this adorable photo that both makes me smile and breaks my heart a little.  The short-haired, orange and white fellow on the right is my beloved Mr. F, also known as Monsieur L'Orange (he was born here in Montréal, after all!)  Mr. F likes to spend his entire day outside in the summer, and, much like a teenager, only comes in to eat and sleep at night (even that is only because we force him...we don't want him getting mixed up with nocturnal, urban riff-raff like the raccoons and skunks that live in our alley.  He gets grumpy when we bring him in at dusk, but he endures it.) 

The long-haired, somewhat mangy-looking ginger character on the left is an alley cat who we call Foxy.  He has roamed our back alley ever since we moved in just over a year ago, and we have been feeding him daily since last fall.  He's so used to us now that he hangs out in our backyard; in this picture, he and Mr. F are chillin' on the roof of our shed.  He comes right up to us, but we now know better than to try to pet him, as I once got a sound thrashing for attempting just that (well, really he just scratched me, but 'sound thrashing' sounds so Victorian). We have seen him get in to some wicked fights with other cats in the neighbourhood, and he is always the instigator - he's crazy as bag of hammers, as my stepmama would say.  But he and F. seem to have an understanding, and scenes like this - the two of them sleeping side by side - are not uncommon.  We've also seen them traipsing down the alley together, going in and out of other yards like old friends going for a walk. (And for pet-owners who might, understandably, find this troubling, F. has all his shots, and takes the top-of-the-line super-expensive internal medicine for fleas, heartworm, worms, etc..)

Anyway, I just think it's sweet that they're pals, and when money is not so tight, we plan to take Foxy to the vet and get him tricked out with shots and a general check-up.  Recently, he has started darting into our stairwell if we leave the door open, and even came into the apartment once. I guess I dream that one day he might trust us enough that we could take him off the streets, at least for the brutal, Montreal winters.  We'll see what he decides...

Opals that make Sad Men's Minds

Before the Great Computer Crisis of 2009, I shipped a doll version of my favourite aesthete, Oscar Wilde, off to a lovely dramaturge in Florida.  I studied some of Wilde's work in my Fin-de-Siecle literature course last year, and fell in love with its beauty and abundance.  In earlier writings, Wilde claimed to believe in nothing other than beauty, so it was also fascinating to see his work evolve after he was imprisoned for "gross indecency". 

I also made a tiny book to accompany Oscar, in which I inscribed one of my favourite passages from Wilde's play, Salomé, based on the biblical story of John the Baptist (so suitable, as today St. Jean Baptiste day here in Quebec):

I have topazes yellow as are the eyes of tigers, and topazes that are pink as the eyes of a wood-pigeon, and green topazes that are as the eyes of cats. I have opals that burn always, with a flame that is cold as ice, opals that make sad men's minds, and are afraid of the shadows. I have onyxes like the eyeballs of a dead woman. I have moonstones that change when the moon changes, and are wan when they see the sun. I have sapphires big like eggs, and as blue as blue flowers. The sea wanders within them, and the moon comes never to trouble the blue of their waves.

I love the beauty-for-beauty's sake of his earlier works, such a Salomé but I was staggered by the sadness and intelligence of De Profundis, which he wrote from prison. It was very long letter to his lover, Alfred Lord Douglas, and was written on paper that Wilde was only allowed to keep in his cell for an hour each day. Here is a very brief excerpt:

I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Love is Merely a Madness...

It has been a busy few weeks, mostly because my family was visiting from Nova Scotia, so there were six people (including two teenagers!) crammed into my two bedroom apartment.  It was a lovely visit, which included visits to the stunning Notre Dame Cathedral, walks along the canal and the new Star Trek movie; from the sublime to the ridiculous, as my grandmother used to say!  (But ridiculous is not necessarily bad and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.)

On a less pleasant note, my computer crashed and now I'm stuck using my husband's ancient, 7-year-old beater of a laptop.  It's amazing and frightening how much using a slow computer detracts from one's quality of life, as everything  takes about 5 times longer.  So, this will be a short post, and hopefully I should have a more efficifient machine very soon. 
Here is my most recent creation and a commission, the cross-dressing and mask-wearing Rosalind from As You Like It.  Now I'm all for love, so it's Rosalind here has some other thoughts to share:

Love is merely a madness, and, I tell
you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip
as madmen do; and the reason why they are
not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is
so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

Happy Summer Lovin' to all you madmen...

Duchess Bunny

This week I finished one of my favourite pieces that I've made (that sentence sounds gramatically offensive somehow, but I'm too tired to fix it). This is a bust of the lovely Ashley D., who requested something blue and Burtonesque bunny ears:

Ashley has the most amazing profile and piercing blue eyes, so I really wanted to try to capture those features.

I also finished two busts of a couple (who prefer to remain nameless) that will be an anniversary gift from lovely wife to handsome husband.

 

(Can I just point out in a moment of self- congratulation that I even made her tiny hoop and multiple stud earrings in doll version? )

 

I just have to give another cheer for The Turn of the Screw, which I linked to in my last post. SO. GOOD.  What a creepy, spine-tingly, beautifully-written little ghost story (little in length, but do dense and fascinating in content).  Right now we're reading Deliverance, which I always thought  was all Burt Reynolds and "squeal like a pig".  Who knew it started as a book? 

Happy Anniversary Rocelia & Gino!

One of the nicest things about custom doll-making is when someone asks me to make a gift for their loved one.  There is something so lovely about people I've never met trusting me enough to send me their personal photos and turn them into something they will give to their amant (I use the French for lover, because 'lover' sounds a bit seamy in English).  I've had a few requests recently for anniversary portraits, one of which was my first custom order for a wall hanging.  This is an adorable couple, Gino and Rocelia, whom I recently had a lot of fun sculpting:

Gino's hat looks a bit wonky, because it's not yet permanently affixed, but this gives an idea of how it will turn out.  I plan to do more portraits soon, and maybe a few that are painted a bit more abstractly, just for fun.  Now how gorgeous are these two?

Other than the six custom orders I plan to finish this weekend (eek! hands, don't fail me now!) I am getting in bed with Henry James.  I just finished reading The Turn of the Screw, a great, turn-of-the-century ghost story.  I'm giving a seminar on it this weekfor my American Gothic course, and so feel I have to read it once more to really grapple with the formal aspects of the book.  It's  quite spooky, and much shorter than my last recommendation, The House of the Seven Gables, which apparently a lot of the people in my class found tedious and overwrought, so my apologies if anyone has sought it out and felt the same. I confess I have a weakness for useless beauty...

 

...but then I would argue beauty is never useless....

Pretty Miss D.

Well, it didn't take me long to fall off the post-every-three-days wagon...I guess I forgot the rigours of academic courses.  I love the class I'm taking (American Gothic) but it does entail about about 100 pages of reading a day, and I'm a slow reader, so that translates into several hours of reading per day.  But it's fascinating stuff; we just finished Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, about the legacy of a puritan who accuses a man of witchcraft in order to wrest his property from him.  It teeters on absurdity at points, but is a great read nevertheless, if you like incredibly verbose, extravagant 19th-century prose, which I do. The real House is in Salem, Hawthorne's birthplace, but is not nearly as interesting-looking as one would imagine it after reading the book; the book cover is much more evocative.

I already have some pictures of doll versions of Hepzibah and Alice Pyncheon forming in my mind....

Some weeks ago I was contacted by the lovely Diana who asked me to make a custom portrait doll of herself.  You will see from these pictures of her why I would be happy to say yes:

 She has stunning eyes and a sweet but somewhat mysterious smile, so while I'm incapable of making smiling dolls, I tried to capture some of that mystery in her doll.

 

I still need to give her a richer skin tone, and get the darker make-up around the eyes, as well as finish an adorable little outfit that Diana designed herself.  I'll post some final pictures when she's all dressed, properly wigged and has her face on!

Ophelia in progress

Currently, I'm participating in the Shakespeare challenge being put on by ADO (Art Dolls Only), a team of doll-makers of which I'm a member.  Participants have been interviewed on the ADO blog for the past few weeks, so I thought I'd share my little interview here. 

1)  Why did you choose this particular character?
I have had an ambivalent relationship with Ophelia over the past 15 years.  As a teenager, I was attracted to tormented characters, and mad women in particular.  I had a print of Waterhouse’s painting of Ophelia over my bed, and went around with a velvet-covered notebook, which I filled with poetry about beautiful women losing their minds.  Your average death-obsessed adolescent.  When I was a little girl, I eventually rebelled against my beloved Barbies by cutting off all their hair and snipping off their toes.  Similarly, as I got older, I started to resent the highly romanticized portrayal of women as frail victims who lose their minds over every little torment.  Eventually, when I saw Kate Winslet’s portrayal of Ophelia, I made peace with the character; Winslet played Ophelia as a stronger character who is driven mad not simply because Hamlet is a jerk, but also because she is a woman with no real agency who is surrounded by people willing to manipulate her for their own ends.  In other words, the whole incestuous, Danish monarchy is mad and Ophelia is just the one who most embodies that madness because she is the one with the least power to affect any change - all fairly true for young, unmarried women of that time. 

 
2) What techniques did you employ? Why?
I chose to make Ophelia as a polymer clay figurine (ie. Head, torso and arms only) to emphasize the idea that she is not entirely whole. But I gave her white hair to counter the usual depiction of her as fragile and waif-like. To me, she has aged a lifetime in her madness, and cannot bear to carry on living knowing the cruelty of which people are capable.

3) What are your associations/ experiences with Shakespeare in general?
I’ve always loved Shakespeare.  As an undergraduate literature student, I studied his plays and I also taught them when I was a high school English teacher.  While there is much debate about his female characters, and whether or not they are misogynist, I think that, like most of his characters, they are complex enough to be read many different ways.  And ultimately, the guy made up his own words – beautiful words – and he could string a hell of a sentence together, and that means more to me than his politics.

I'll post some more pictures of Ophelia once she's finished (and I've taken those cruel pins out of her head!)

Something New

One of my many goals for this summer and all the delicious time it promises is  to update my blog every 2 - 3 days.  I must remember that I can include short posts as well; sometimes the pressure of thinking up  a full post causes me to avoid it altogether. So here is an attempt at a short (but hopefully sweet) post to get me in the habit of being a better blogger!

I have made my very first piece of jewelry as a custom order for a sweet lady in France.  It was fun and not as difficult as I thought it would be to work in a very small scale. This pendant is only 2" x 2" :

 

Making the teeny tiny eyes and the eensy weensy wig was pretty fussy, but I'm happy with how it turned out and plan to make more.

And, apropos of nothing in particular (I guess I'm not yet totally at ease with the micro-post!) I'm working on a commission of a Shakespearean character.  I won't reveal the details just yet, but as I've been looking through my husband's ancient copy of the Bard's Complete Works (mine was purloined while I was in university), I came across one of my favourite lines from King Lear.  I used to teach Lear to high school students; you can imagine the sheer enthusiasm expressed by all the guys in gold chains and baggy pants and the girls whose hot-pink g-strings peeked out conspicuously above the lines of their track pants (g-strings and track pants??  What the what??) Anyway, what made it tolerable was getting to reread the language over and over.  (That and the fact that we got to see Christopher Plummer as Lear in the Stratford, Ontario production...swoon!)

So here are the play's final lines, perfect for this grey and melancholy day:

The weight of this sad time we must
obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to
say.
The oldest have borne most; we that are
young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

The Divine Ms. Kelly

A few weeks ago I posted an in-progress photo of a custom order I've been working on; it was commissioned by the lovely Ms. Kelly.  Kelly asked for a self-portrait figurine in black with a Victorian costume, and I absolutely loved making her.

Part of the fun was making my first quasi-authentic 19th Century bustle.  The originals were made from wire cage and fabric, so I used window screen instead:

I also gave her a deeply pleated skirt and a five-piece corset:

And of course, a ragged little parasol for all that melancholy  wandering about in the rain so de-rigeur for Victorian ladies (well probably not really because they were always cooped up at home with the vapours, but that's how I like to imagine them ...)

Here is the original Kelly:

I've also added two more 3-D illustrations to the shop. These were a lot of fun to make, and nice also because they don't take nearly as long as a doll, so I get to see the results more quickly.  I'll be offering them as custom orders later this week.

And finally, after marking over 100 papers in two weeks, I am finished my teaching contract!! I am officially unemployed, which is both scary and exciting.  The dolls are coming!

More Customs and Even Closer

 Last night I invigilated the final exam for my course; I still have to grade half their final papers and the exams, but then I will be done!!!  My new goal in life is never to grade another paper, so I'm very much looking forward to having the summer off to concentrate on dolls, Etsy,  blogging and general stuff-making.  I'm taking a course in American Gothic Fiction (lots of Hawthorne and Poe) and I have two words with which to express my feelings about that:  Yippee Skippee!  Dolls and spooky stories?  What a way to spend a summer...

I'm still working a way on several custom orders, and have recently completed two.  One very special project was creating a doll that was meant to embody the spirit of Sapphire, the beautiful cat pictured below, who has passed on to kitty  heaven. Linda, her  'owner' (I don't really like that term in relationship to animals, especially when  I feel more like I exist in service to my cats!)  asked me to create a doll that could help her commemorate Sapphire, and as a cat lover myself who has lost felt the pain of losing a beloved pet, I was honoured to have the opportunity.

Sapphire has that beautifully superior, slightly cranky look of so many cats,  so I tried to capture that in the doll's expression.  I also used Sapphire's beautiful grey and black coat as inspiration for the doll's clothing.

  And I made my first attempt at a clay pet; far from perfect, but it was fun to try and I will definitely be making more.

You can read more about Sapphire and see some of Linda's lovely illustrations here.

I also made another version of Ghostly Minka, who was my one Hallowe'en offering last year.

This Minka has the same punky hairstyle but a slightly more demure expression.  I need to braver with short hair styles, because I do love how they turn out. 

And speaking of Hallowe'en creepies, if you have a vampire fetish, you should check out the BBC series my husband and I just finished watching, Ultraviolet.   You can find it on netflix in the States or zip in Canada, and here are my top four reasons to watch:

1. It's about vampires
2. The almost absurdly handsome Idris Elba (you might know him as Stringer Bell from The Wire, but he's even yummier with an English accent.
3.  It's good
4. It's funny (yet frightening) to see how hilariously passé clothes from 1998 already look (lots of shiny suits and unfortunately shoulder-padded leather jackets.)

Also, if, like me, you watch all things vampire, you might also recognize Stephen Moyer who plays Bill Compton on True Blood.  Ten years ago, he looked positively petite and fey compared to his more recent vampire incarnation.